The girl's face returns to being pale and prim. Boundaries have been restored, just as he's getting to feel paternal. "Very well," Annabelle says. "I'll tell her you've been released, if she asks."
"Might she ask? Wait. Don't get prissy. Tell me, why did you want to get us together?"
"You seem so interested in her. Your face comes to life when I mention her."
"It does? Maybe it's looking at you that does it." He dares go on, "I've been wondering, though, if you should still be living with her. Maybe you ought to get out from under her wing."
"I did, for a while. I didn't like it. Living alone is tough. Men can get nasty."
"Can we really? I'm sorry to hear it."
Her face softens into a dear smile, that curls her upper lip at the edges and buckles the plump part in the middle. "Anyway, she says just what you say. But I like it, for now. It's not like she's my mother any more, she's a roommate. Believe me, bad things can happen to women who live alone in this city. Brewer isn't New York but it isn't Penn Park, either."
Of course. She can read his address right off the chart at the foot of the bed. To her he is one of those Penn Park snobs he himself has always resented. "Brewer's a rugged town," he agrees, sinking back into his pillow. "Always was. Coal and steel. Bars and cathouses all along the railroad tracks right through the middle of the city, when I was young." He glances away, at the ornamental brickwork, the hurrying dry dark clouds. He tells his nurse, "You know best how to live your own life. Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time." Under the pear trees, in Paradise.
Lying there these days, Harry thinks fondly of those dead bricklayers who bothered to vary their rows at the top of the three buildings across the street with such festive patterns of recess and protrusion, diagonal and upright, casting shadows in different ways at different times of the day, these men of another century up on their scaffold, talking Pennsylvania Dutch among themselves, or were Italians doing all the masonry even then? Lying here thinking of all the bricks that have been piled up and knocked down and piled up again on the snug square streets that lift toward Mt. Judge, he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives. There is a satisfaction in such an overview, a faint far-off communal thrill, but hard to sustain over against his original and continuing impression that Brewer and all the world beyond are just frills on himself, like the lace around a plump satin valentine, himself the heart of the universe, like the Dalai Lama, who in the news lately – Tibet is still restless, after nearly forty years of Chinese rule – was reported to have offered to resign. But the offer was greeted with horror by his followers, for whom the Dalai Lama can no more resign godhood than Harry can resign selfhood.
He watches a fair amount of television. It's right there, in front of his face; its wires come out of the wall behind him, just like oxygen. He finds that facts, not fantasies, are what he wants: the old movies on cable AMC seem stiff and barky in their harshly lit black and white, and the old TV shows on NIK impossibly tinny with their laugh tracks and spray-set Fifties hairdos, and even the incessant sports (rugby from Ireland, curling from Canada) a waste of his time, stories told people with time to kill, where he has time left only for truth, the truth of DSC or Channel 12, MacNeilLehrer so gravely bouncing the news between New York and Washington and reptiles on Smithsonian World flickering their forked tongues in the desert blaze or the giant turtles of Galápagos on World of Survival battling for their lives or the Russians battling the Nazis in the jumpy film clips of World War II as narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier ("Twenty million dead," he intones at the end, as the frame freezes and goes into computer-blur and the marrow-chilling theme music comes up, thrilling Harry to think he was there, on the opposite side of the Northern Hemisphere, jumping on tin cans and balling up tin foil for his anti-Hitler bit, a ten-year-old participant in actual history) and War and Peace in the Nuclear Age and Nature's Way and Portraits of Power and Wonders of the World and Wildlife Chronicles and Living Body and Planet Earth and struggle and death and cheetahs gnawing wildebeests and tarantulas fencing with scorpions and tiny opossums scrambling for the right nipple under the nature photographer's harsh lights and weaverbirds making the most intricate damn nests just to attract one little choosy female and the incredible cleverness and variety and energy and waste of it all, a kind of crash course he is giving himself in the ways of the world. There is just no end to it, no end of information.
The nightly news has a lot of China on it – Gorbachev visiting, students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but not protesting Gorbachev, in fact they like him, all the world likes him, despite that funny mark on his head shaped like Japan. What the Chinese students seem to want is freedom, they want to be like Americans, but they look like Americans already, in blue jeans and T-shirts. Meanwhile in America itself the news is that not only President George Bush but Mrs. Bush the First Lady take showers with their dog Millie, and if that's all the Chinese want we should be able to give it to them, or something close, though it makes Harry miss Reagan slightly, at least he was dignified, and had that dream distance; the powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself. With this new one you know he knows something, but it seems a small something. Rabbit doesn't want to have to picture the President and middle-aged wife taking showers naked with their dog. Reagan and Nancy had their dignity, their computer-blur, even when their bowel polyps and breasts were being snipped off in view of billions.
Janice comes in at six on Tuesday while he is eating his last bland supper – he is being released tomorrow. She is wearing her new coat and a gray skirt and a low-cut magenta blouse almost as vivid as the polka-dot dress Ruth wore in his dream. His wife looks energized, businesslike, her salt-and-pepper hair trimmed and given body by a hairdresser who has eliminated the bangs, gelled them back into a softly bristling mass, parted low on one side. Janice reminds him of those heightened and rapid-talking women on television who give the news. She in fact is brimming with news. Her eyes seem to be wearing contact lenses of an unnatural glitter until he realizes those are tears, prepared for him during the station break.
"Oh Harry," she begins, "it's worse than we thought! Thousands and thousands!"
"Thousands of what?"
"Of dollars Nelson stole! Charlie and I and this accountant his nephew knows – Mildred says she was too old for doing an audit and anyway is too busy in the nursing home – went over there today, Charlie said I had to be there, he and the accountant weren't enough, and I asked to see the books, Nelson was there for once, and he looked at me in this heartbreaking hopeless way I'll never forget as long as I live and said, Sure, Mom, what did I want to know? He told us everything. At first, when he needed money so desperately for the, you know, the cocaine, he would just write himself a check marked `Expenses' or `Operating Cash,' but Mildred, she was still around then, questioned him about it and he got scared. Anyway, these little amounts, a hundred or even two at a time, weren't really enough to keep him going, so he got the idea of offering people a discount on the used cars if they paid in cash or with a check written directly out to him."
"I told you there weren't enough used sales on the statements," Harry says, in a triumph that feels rather flat. Ever since they poked that catheter in, there's been something drained about his emotional responses. "How many cars did he pull this stunt with?"